FOI - Spending & Council tax income [Jan 2026]

For the period 1 January 2020 to the present date, please confirm the total gross spend (a single figure, or a breakdown by year if easier to provide) in each of the following categories:

1. Consultancy fees (all external consultants or firms providing management, strategy, or advisory services).
2. Legal fees (solicitors, barristers, external legal support).
3. Recruitment and agency fees (recruitment agencies, executive search firms, interim placement charges).
4. Other professional services (audit, accountancy, communications/PR, design, research, and similar non-frontline contracted services).
5. Agency staff and temporary workers (via staffing or temp agencies).
6. Staff training and development (external courses, conferences, training providers).
7. Marketing, advertising, and publicity (campaigns, media spend, promotional materials).
8. Office accommodation and facilities management (rent, maintenance, utilities, and associated property/office costs).

If it is simpler, you may provide the totals for each financial year instead of a single combined figure.

In addition, please confirm the total council tax income received by the authority since 1 January 2020 (or per financial year, if easier).

Response

30 December 2025

The information you have requested is held by the GLA and is publicly available. As such it is exempt from release under the FOI Act (Section 21; Information accessible to the applicant by other means).

The GLA’s spending over £250 is reported by period and by financial year at Our spending | London City Hall and searchable by category (see Expenditure Account Code Description column).

The GLA’s income from the GLA’s council tax precept can be found in the annual statement of accounts Annual accounts and governance statement | London City Hall

You may also be interested in the Mayoral decisions for each budget at The Mayor's budget | London City Hall

These pages can all be found at Spending money wisely | London City Hall

Updated request and response

I respectfully request that this decision be reconsidered.

While the GLA publishes transaction-level expenditure data over £250, the information I requested was not transaction data, but high-level aggregated totals for specific expenditure categories (e.g. consultancy, legal fees, recruitment, professional services, agency staff, training, marketing, and office accommodation) over a defined period.

Directing a requester to multiple datasets containing many thousands of individual transactions does not provide the information requested in a form that is reasonably accessible, nor does it negate the duty under Section 1 of the Act where the authority can reasonably extract or aggregate the information from existing systems.

The Information Commissioner has previously made clear that Section 21 is not engaged where:

• the authority is being asked for summarised or compiled information, and
• the alternative source would require the requester to manually interrogate large volumes of raw data to recreate the information.

Other London public bodies and boroughs have been able to provide aggregate figures for the same expenditure categories using existing account codes or financial summaries, without difficulty.

If it assists, I am content for the information to be provided:

• using the closest available expenditure account codes already used by the GLA;
• as single total figures or annual totals only; and
• without any additional reconciliation, apportionment, or manual review of individual transactions.

I am not seeking disclosure of individual transactions, invoices, or supplier-level detail.

Information released 

The GLA has extracted the totals by GLA category and is releasing it today. Please see attached summary of expenditure by code / description for 2019-20 to 2025-26 (to date). This includes both capital and revenue spend and is a summary of what is already published in our £250 reports.

See documents attached 9 February 2026